What Friends Are For
by Kryschenn
Summary: Vignette. The Arrangement works in mysterious ways, but always to the benefit of both parties involved. PG for a crude comment or two.


**What Friends Are For**

**By Kryschenn**

Summary: Vignette. The Arrangement works in mysterious ways, but always to the benefit of both parties involved.

Disclaimer: _Good Omens_ belongs to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I own nothing but my awe of these two writers. No profit, no offense, No Sue I. The _Decameron_ belongs to Giovanni Boccaccio, although I'm not really sure how copyrights worked back in the 1300's.

Footnotes are at the end of each section, rather than at the end of the document.

-8-

"Ding ding! It's me!"

Aziraphale sighed and shook his head slightly. "Of course it is, dear boy, of course it is!" he called from the kitchenette. The proximity of a demon always had a noticeable effect on angelic senses, and in this case, the tingle against his aura brought with it a comfortable sense of familiarity. Aziraphale had known that Crowley would be paying a visit to his bookshop long before the demon had even rounded the street corner in his Bentley. Besides, the sign in the bookshop window had said CLOSED. Only someone like Crowley would simply not respect that,(1) and just walk right in. "I'm finishing up the morning dishes, make yourself at home!" Aziraphale offered. "I'll just be a few minutes."

"Hey, not a problem, angel!" Crowley called back, casually tossing onto the counter the morning's _Daily Telegraph,_ which he had discovered waiting on the doorstep. He'd come over early this morning, so he could preemptively let Aziraphale know that last night's incident of the news anchorwoman losing her skirt on live television was completely Not His Fault. But why pass up an opportunity to needle the angel when it arose? "Make myself at home, huh? Okay, I'll just light a few of these books on fire, toss some sulfur here and there, then I'll feel right at home! Yeah, hey, what do we have here, a first edition Tolstoy? Bet that's nice and dry and flammable!"

"Don't. You. Dare!" Aziraphale stormed out of the kitchenette, falling quite short of the image of Divine Wrath in his raiment of rubber gloves and tartan bathrobe, while not brandishing a flaming sword so much as a soggy dish rag. "No fire, no brimstone, and certainly no attempts to recreate Hell in MY shop, do you understand?"

"Of course," Crowley grinned. "Besides, the smell of the sulfur would be smothered by all the dust in here anyway. Don't want to let good brimstone go to waste, now, do I?" Running a hand along one of the bookshelves, he smugly showed off the dusty, grayish smudge it left on his fingertips.

Aziraphale didn't let the display bother him. He was quite proud of his dust collection, as a matter of fact. It helped keep allergen-sensitive customers away, after all. Rolling his eyes, he huffed, "If not for my angelic patience, I would find you unbearable. You do realize that, do you not?" Returning to the kitchenette with an impressive air of long-suffering tolerance, he said, "Just let me finish in here. You can behave yourself for a few minutes, can't you, my dear boy?"

Crowley flashed his nearly-innocent smile(2) until the angel had disappeared around the corner. Then, glancing at the rows upon rows of carefully organized and preserved antique books in the shelves all around him, he answered cheerfully, but just quietly enough that Aziraphale could not hear him. "No, actually, I can't."

The demon began to hum a chipper tune as he went to work.

(1) _Nor did he respect locked and bolted doors, apparently._

(2) _It would have appeared a lot more innocent had he actually remembered to hide the fangs._

-8-

"There, now," Aziraphale said about ten minutes later, emerging once again from the kitchenette. "That's done. Now, what is it that you... you... CROWLEY!"

Said demon looked up from where he sat in the midst of his handiwork, a purely guileless expression on what features could be seen around his dark sunglasses. "What?" he asked in a childlike tone of utter blamelessness.

"You... my BOOKS!" Aziraphale shrieked.

The angel had walked in on a scene of disaster, with Crowley as the calm center of a storm that had torn through the bookshop. Every shelf of every bookcase was devoid of its venerable literary contents. The books themselves were scattered wildly about, stacked haphazardly in dangerously leaning piles, turned upside-down and balanced in a precarious tower in the window, tucked randomly in planters and wastepaper baskets, tied with twine to the blades of the creaky ceiling fan. Every old book that contained a drawing, etching, or woodcut of a nude human form was propped open to that page and adorned with a yellow sticky note containing Crowley's lewd comments. There was even a paperback recreation of Stonehenge on the counter.

"Your books?" Crowley repeated with half-interest. He was lounging on the floor, his elbow propped up on one of the shop's thicker tomes. "They're not bad." He turned his attention back to the copy of Boccaccio's _Decameron_ that he'd been reading, paying particular attention to the naughty bits. "Oh! Listen to this! '_Tearing open her clothes and displaying her br_-' "

"I HAVE WORKED FOR CENTURIES TO KEEP MY BOOKSHOP PRECISELY ORGANIZED!" Aziraphale shouted, clearly not interested in hearing how Zinevra proved to the Sultan that she was a woman. "AND WHEN MY BACK IS TURNED FOR JUST TEN MINUTES, YOU... YOU... YOU DESECRATE IT!"

The demon grinned cheekily. That had been entirely the point.

Aziraphale stopped suddenly, his eyes narrowing in suspicion as he read the demon's expression. Oh. So that was what Crowley was up to. Well, two could play at that game.

Crowley had been expecting one of a variety of different responses to his handiwork, but even he had not quite been counting on suddenly being whacked smartly over the head with the _Daily Telegraph._

"Out!" Aziraphale shouted, brandishing the _Telegraph_ in a way that made Crowley dodge quickly before he could be walloped again. "Out! OUT!" The angel advanced menacingly, with snow-white wings suddenly spread and as much Righteous Anger that could be mustered by a bathrobed Principality wielding a rolled-up newspaper. It was impressive enough, judging by Crowley's quick scramble to his feet and dash towards the door. He hadn't needed to be told twice, or that third time, for that matter. But despite the threat of bodily harm, or at least of having today's headline imprinted in reverse on his forehead, Crowley was laughing all the way to the exit.

"YOU ARE IMPOSSIBLE!" Aziraphale shouted, chasing after his counterpart and managing to score another blow to the back of his head. "Get out and do not come back until I can get this place in some semblance of order again!"

Crowley had pushed the door open(3) and leapt through it just in time to avoid a third blow. He was now standing exactly two inches past the threshold, technically just enough to be considered "out" of Aziraphale's bookshop, and he was grinning smugly. "All right," he said in a stage whisper, "I'll come back around noon, then, shall I?"

"Yes, that should be fine," Aziraphale stage-whispered back, his sudden cordialness causing his showcase of Wrath to slip noticeably.

"Great, I'll bring take-out sushi," Crowley agreed.

"Excellent," Aziraphale agreed. "I should like a negitoro-maki and a side of edamame." And when that had been arranged, Aziraphale immediately became a Wrathful Angel once more, bent on avenging his wronged bookshop. "Now get out of here before I strike you again!" He raised the newspaper dangerously, and Crowley, nearly choking on his laughter, managed to let out a yelp of feigned terror before dashing down the sidewalk.

(3) _Yes, for the second time, it had been locked, but as it turns out, even the locks felt the Fear of Crowley._

-8-

Only twenty meters or so down the sidewalk, the demon came to a stop, leaning against a lamp post and holding his aching sides as he tried for several unsuccessful moments to get his laughter under control. Eventually, with several deep gulps of air, he finally got mastery of himself. He even had to raise his sunglasses to wipe away a few mirthful tears that were threatening to spill from his eyes. Oh, if Downstairs could see him now, whooping it up like a giddy schoolboy, he would be chin-deep in reprimands, but Aziraphale's reaction had been worth the slight chance. All that Divine Wrath and Anger and everything... the angel had done it so well that anyone besides Crowley might have actually believed it.

Crowley was still snickering as he reached out his open hand. In it, with a little puff of yellowish smoke, appeared a small notebook which seemed to be bound in aged, cracked human skin.(4) Beside it, also in his hand, was a quill pen. The feather that made this nearly-perfect writing implement was long and downy-soft, so pure white that it almost glowed blue. It was one of Aziraphale's.(5) He carried it around expressly for writing his reports, and, if asked, often pretended that he considered it a trophy he had claimed while attacking an unsuspecting angel.

Opening the notebook, he glanced at his watch and made a note of the time and date, and then, carefully considering each word and the spin he was going to put on them, scribbled an entry in red ink which would later become one of his reports to Down Below:

_Desecrated several centuries of an angel's works in less than ten minutes. Laughed in the face of his dismay._

There, that ought to do it. Grinning, he closed his notebook and made it, and the quill, disappear back into the netherworld, which, as far as it goes, he had discovered was a pretty good storage unit. Deeming it safe to approach the bookstore again without risking another Divine Smack Upside The Head, he whistled casually as he strolled back in that direction. It was a calculated risk, as he was forced to go back that way if he wanted to get back in the Bentley.

He could just imagine how Aziraphale was playing up this little incident in his own report book right now. Oh, well, at least they both had something productive to report to their superiors at the end of the week. Such an outcome was, as far as Crowley was concerned, entirely in keeping with their Arrangement. And after all, that was what friends were for, wasn't it?

(4) _Actually it was a very nice imitation made of vinyl. Crowley had picked it up in the costume shop at the mall, three years ago. And since it was two days after Halloween, he'd gotten it at a 75 percent discount, too._

(5) _Pulled out, quite by accident, in all the chaos resulting on a lovely, sunny day when Crowley's demonic nature had taken over for an instant, and he had been unable to resist the urge to shove the angel headlong into the duck pond at St. James' Park._

-8-

Shaking his head with fond exasperation, Aziraphale shut and locked the door as Crowley fled down the street. Turning back to the mess that was his bookstore, he sighed grandly and then snapped his fingers. Slowly, gracefully, the jumbled books rose up, swirling gently in the center of the room, like some aerial ballet performed by paper butterflies. One by one, soloists pirouetted away from this elegant dance to slide back into their proper places on the bookshelf, while yellow flutters of lewd sticky notes floated down to the floor and combusted in small puffs of clean, white smoke.

It was true that Aziraphale had spent centuries on his filing system as he acquired new books over the years, but once they'd been given a place, the angel always remembered exactly where each tome belonged. Putting them back had not been nearly as difficult as he'd tried to make Crowley believe.

That task done, Aziraphale stepped behind the counter. From a locked little drawer beneath the ancient cash register, he pulled out a small notebook, bound in the palest blue silk purfled with fine gold thread. From this same drawer, he also produced a fine, long quill. The feather was a deep, iridescent black that flashed a dark rainbow of emerald and sapphire and blood-red ruby as it was moved in the light. It was one of Crowley's.(6) Whenever he was asked by another angel why he used this feather to write his reports, he explained its presence away by saying it was a prize taken in a terrible fight against a demon who had attacked him from behind.

Taking a moment to gather his thoughts, Aziraphale opened the book while deciding how to most impressively paraphrase the results of Crowley's little prank. He looked up at the antique Louis XIV clock which sat at the end of a row of books. Making a note of the date and time in his precise copperplate handwriting, he wrote an entry in glittering gold ink which would later become one of his reports to Upstairs:

_Smote and then Banished a demon caught in the act of desecrating several centuries of my work here on God's Earth._

That sounded just about right. Smiling, Aziraphale tucked the book and quill safely back into the drawer, and then went about double-checking his work of replacing his precious books. Of course he had quickly realized what Crowley was up to, once the shock had passed. It was irritating, but ultimately harmless, especially since Aziraphale had noted that none of the books in his back room had been so much as touched. Crowley knew what was forgivable, and where the lines were that were never to be crossed. Incidents like this happened quite often between them. They gave Crowley a chance to laugh demonically and gave Aziraphale a chance to play the Avenging Angel. And even when the tables were turned and it was Crowley who was the victim, he soon laughed it off in stride. But no matter who started it an who ended it, Aziraphale had long since conceded that these odd cycles of prank-and-vengeance were completely in the spirit of the Arrangement, since in the end, both would have something positive to report to their superiors for the week.

After all, that was what friends were for, wasn't it?

(6) _Pulled out, quite by accident, in all the chaos ensuing from having to haul a floundering and waterlogged angel __**out**__ of the duck pond at St. James' Park. _

-Fin-

p.s. That little duck pond incident that was mentioned in the footnotes … go check out Master Of All Imagination's vignette, "The Duck Pond Incident" to read about it in full!


End file.
